If you live here, you should be able to get healthcare here—and afford it.
If we want rural healthcare to survive, we have to start putting patients and the people who care for them first. Because the future of rural Minnesota isn’t just about whether people can grow old here. It’s whether the next generation can be born here, too.
- Keep care close to home and make sure people can afford to use it. Having a clinic or hospital nearby doesn’t mean much if insurance premiums and deductibles, and prescription costs are so high that families put off going. We need to lower those costs and make sure insurance actually works when people need it.
- Stop making rural communities pay for cuts made somewhere else. When Medicaid gets cut, rural hospitals lose money, nursing homes get squeezed, and families have fewer places to turn for care. And when SNAP gets cut, seniors and families with kids have a harder time putting healthy food on the table, which only makes people sicker and drives healthcare costs up later. Those cuts don’t stay in Washington, D.C. They land right here at home.
- Give rural hospitals something they can actually plan around. One-time funds and short-term fixes might keep the lights on for a while, but you can’t hire nurses, keep a clinic open, or bring back maternity care with money that might disappear next year. Rural healthcare needs dependable support.
- Put patients ahead of profits. Lower prescription drug costs, protect Medicare and Medicaid, strengthen coverage and premium subsidies through the Affordable Care Act, and rein in the corporate consolidation that keeps driving up costs and limiting choices.
You can live in a town without a hospital nearby. But pretty quickly, you start asking some hard questions. What happens when your kid spikes a fever at 10 at night? Your parents are getting older, and every specialist appointment means a two-hour round trip in the middle of the workday. Your wife gets pregnant, and suddenly you realize prenatal appointments, ultrasounds—even a place to deliver a baby—aren’t available here anymore.
And then there’s health insurance. Premiums go up. Deductibles go up. Co-pays go up. Now there’s coinsurance. What does that even mean? Somehow we pay more every year and get a little less covered. The local school district offers it, but can teachers afford to pay their part of the premiums?
And meanwhile, the people actually taking care of us are being asked to do more with less. Nurses and EMTs are stretched thin. Clinics are trying to keep the doors open. Rural hospitals have beds they can’t afford to staff. Patients get sent an hour or two away because there’s nobody available to take care of them here.
But somehow there’s still plenty of money in healthcare. Big insurance companies are doing just fine. Giant health systems keep getting bigger. The people paying premiums are paying more, and the people providing the care are getting squeezed. Something about that doesn’t add up.
If you live here, you should be able to get healthcare here. And you should be able to afford it. Because when people can’t get into a clinic, they don’t go. When they can’t afford the bill, they don’t go. And eventually that smaller problem becomes an emergency and everybody pays more for it. It’s not because rural communities stopped caring. It’s because the system stopped working.
In America, we pay more for healthcare than just about anybody, and somehow we keep getting less for it. One rural hospital can’t fix that. The state of Minnesota can’t fix all of it. But we can start putting more of our healthcare dollars toward actually taking care of people, and less toward making insurance company CEOs and healthcare executives richer and richer while everybody else gets squeezed. That isn’t radical. It’s common sense.